Making Dens

679; 2006

Find it at:

There's something both cheesy and charming about album covers that literally illustrate their titles. Take, for example, Rush's Moving Pictures, which unless you were too stoned to remember, featured uniformed workman-types outside an art gallery moving pictures (hardee-fucking-har). Mystery Jets have chosen a somewhat more intangible phrase for their debut album, Making Dens, but are no less explicit in their cover execution. There they are, relaxing in a den, complete with Persian rugs, pub-quality wallpaper, pianos, old gramophones, model airplanes, candlelight, typewriters, stereo speakers-- however, the trees looming overhead betray the fact that they've set up all their crap in the middle of a forest.

It's just the sort of curious scene that seems to justify the British press hitching Mystery Jets onto the lineage of Great British Eccentrics, one that spans Syd Barrett to Julian Cope to, more recently, the Coral and British Sea Power. You can see what they're getting at: You don't find too many bands whose on-stage set-up looks like a kitchenware store, who hail from a chunk of land on the Thames called Eel Pie Island, and who have a singer (Blaine Harrison) who can address the guitarist as "dad" (aka 55-years-young Henry Harrison). But eccentricity implies a measure of frivolity and whimsy that is palpably absent from Making Dens; though the restless time changes and laser-show synth overtures betray prog-rock's ostentatious influence, the tightly constructed songs here (all but two of which stay under the five-minute mark) bristle with a passion and purpose that belongs only to the truly committed and composed.

"It always pays to be brave/ From the cradle to grave," singer Blaine declares on opener "You Can't Fool Me, Dennis", and he knows of what he speaks: Born with spina bifida, Blaine has spent his entire 20-year-life walking with crutches. As such, he possesses the commanding, uncompromising voice of someone for whom nothing came easy; a restless romantic in the mould of Patrick Wolf, Clearlake's Jason Pegg, or the Futureheads' Barry Hyde, you could force him to sing a capella before a crowd of lagered up Millwall fans and he wouldn't flinch. In a rare moment of understatement, he sings, "Emotion pulls you like a horse-drawn cart"-- an understatement that belies the fact that emotion actually pulls Mystery Jets like an Autobahn-bound Benz with a cinder block dropped on the gas pedal.

Practically every track is pitched to hit the back rows, from the student-disco pint-raiser "The Boy Who Ran Away" to the apocalyptic "Zoo Time" to the climactic Dexy's-charged skiffle gallop of "Alas Agnes". But couched within the blustery delivery are pleas for intimacy: "Diamond in the Dark" recounts first dances, romances and unhappy endings, while, in the most overt reference to Blaine's medical history, "Little Bag of Hair" explores the emotional dependency between a bed-ridden patient and his caregiver. So, in effect, like most prog-informed bands, Mystery Jets do deal in fantasy. But theirs has nothing to do with warlocks, goblins and temples of Syrinx: like the makeshift living room depicted on the album cover, Making Dens dreams of the simple life-- specifically, the privilege of falling in and out of love-- that's so often denied to those who lack the means to fully enjoy it.